


in pursuit of sincerity

by irivail (summerboysam)



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: Amanda is a chapital c charcter in this tho, But also, Divorce, F/M, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Misogyny, Post-Canon Fix-It, Psychopath Rehabilitation Program, Psychopaths In Love, also this has no warnings so far but i'll probably have to add them, sorry but Michael's kind of a dick
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 00:45:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17971241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerboysam/pseuds/irivail
Summary: “Yeah, I’ll swear on it."The clouds hang low and purple over the stars, scraping the hills behind them. Somewhere in the distance, a siren goes off. Michael guesses the cops found a new target. He guesses they’re free now.He lights another cigarette and doesn’t even mind when Trevor throws a foot over his ankle.Fucking free.or: two men who made their living on lies pinky promise each other honesty.





	in pursuit of sincerity

Amanda tells him she’s in love on a Wednesday morning. _He’s quiet and dignified and just, really nice,_ she says while combing her shower wet hair with her fingers, squinting at her puffy morning eyes in the mirror to avoid looking at him. Michael wants to say that _just, really nice_ isn’t exactly how you describe the love of your life, but the words dry up in his throat. It’s a step-up from depressed, lying, degenerate monster, at least. She deserves a guy who is _just, really nice_.

Amanda looks at herself some more, then focuses over mirror-Amanda’s shoulders at him, back at her, back at him. _The one time I want you to fucking fight, you’re silent,_ said with no emotion. Flat voice flat eyes flat colors, so much emptier than when he had met her. He has defeated this woman, he realizes, disgust coiling through his belly. Conquered her, chipped away at all her edges, clipped all her teeth, pulled them out one by one and stuffed bitterness down her throat instead.

What is there left to say, Mandy?

The sun slowly rises over the Vinewood Hills past her head and he sees something there, a sliver of something worth keeping, same as he did that night at the strip club when he uprooted her first. He’s smarter now, or maybe just a little less desperate. Too little too late, even back then.  
_The kids already know. Tracey wants to move in with a friend. You can look at houses with Jimmy later. Gary has a lovely little condo near the tennis courts, I’m moving there in a few days time._

Maybe we could all play, sometime. You and Gary and me.

_Sure thing Mandy._

\-- 

Their marriage turns out easier to bury than his actual real fake body, and isn’t that just fucking sad. They stand over the rotting corpse of it, glasses smashed onto their tiles, whiskey seeping into the cracks in the marble, the sun falling through the glass doors painting the scene in neon lights. The house is silent as the dead, now. Everything so long left unsaid spilled from their mouths, joining all the parts that had made them _them_ lying spread out on the floor.

Amanda is moving out. The kids are already gone. This time, they won’t come back to him, because Amanda is in love. _I do love him, Michael! I know you couldn’t love if it were the end of days, but I do!,_ shouted into the distance between them. Gary’s pickup pulling into the driveway seems obscenely loud in the absence of their voices.

His Daddy had never taught him how to be the bigger man, just how to be the one bringing a gun to a knife fight. Right now, though, he’s staring at this woman who stuck with him longer than anybody else ever had. (Other than – No. Trevor never stuck with him, just stuck _to_ him like gum to the bottom of your shoe.) His usual defenses don’t rise.

_I’ll clean this up before perfect Gary sees our dirty little secrets spilled all over. Go._ He can give her this. He hasn’t given her love, he can at least give her the option to go seek it herself.

 _He thinks you hit me._ Michael stops where he’s bending down to pick up the shards. Rights himself. Stares at her.

_He thinks you’re an alcoholic and a drug addict and an awful, disgusting, pathetic fucking excuse of a man who’s no good for me._

Gary wouldn’t be wrong, the rational part of his brain said. The red, red _red_ part of his brain stays disgustingly quiet. Gary wouldn’t be wrong. What a pathetic fucking sack of shit he is, not even man enough to go up against the lover of his goddamn wife anymore. Two weeks ago, he would have demolished that fucker’s life. Ten years ago, he would have demolished his perfect fucking insides.

_I told him he’s wrong._ Amanda comes towards him, takes his hands into hers and takes the shards he doesn’t realize he’s been crushing into his flesh away from him. He absently thinks this is the most intimate they’ve been in all their time together, his blood coating both of them in the sun-flooded, hollow carcass of their life. _You’re a liar, a cheat and a selfish fucking bastard, but you’re mine, my Michael, my husband. I didn’t forget that promise I made when you took me away from my first life. I hope you didn’t forget, either._

His head floods with static when she lets go and walks away, already calling out to Gary.

_Till death do us part._ The door falls into place behind her.

\--

Sports, for him, has always been about the blood. Why even play if you have no bruises to show for it, afterwards? The bone deep satisfaction of pushing your body further than it had any fucking right to go, the heavy weight of your limbs after, the bile-rising, twinging pain in your calf at every step because some fuckhead jammed his heel right between the tendons –

Really, tennis is a piss-poor excuse of a fucking sport and anyone who bothers to try at it is a fucking loser.

Gary makes the match point. Stellar body control, perfect arch of the arm. Game, ready, set, easy as that. Figures Amanda’s new boy toy is ace at fucking tennis.

Michael struggles with sucking breath into his blackened lungs while Gary walks up to the net. He lies his hands with the bat over it, crosses his ankles, easy hands, light feet. _Nice match there,/i > Gary says. His father’s voice lays itself over the words, the hideous, mocking _sport_ tacks itself on like a leech. _Nice match there, sport, getting real fucking sissy on me, huh?_ Gary is stark against the babyblue sky, opaque and concrete. Michael’s hands against his knees are, too. His father isn’t._

_Amanda comes all but running towards him, body already angled to slide between him and Gary. On his next breath Michael carefully, purposefully lets go of every blood-dipped fantasy swirling around amidst the sweat-steam in his brain._

__You have really good footing, and a real mean right hand, oh man. Wanna play again tomorrow? I’ll show you proper bat-handling technique, your serve will be killer, man._ Gary is jovial and easy, easy, easy. Amanda forces a smile, eyes boring into Michael’s. He can see the secrets there, can see her fear for Gary, for herself. Not that there’s anything to be afraid of. Michael’s respectable now, a second movie deal tucked under his belt instead of a piece (the piece is safely wrapped in his change of clothes, buried in his sports bag). He’s finally domesticated, just in time to have Amanda pull the whole fucking domestic floor out from under his feet and send him crashing into the fucking tarmat court. They have nothing to fear from him._

_Gary’s carefully, purposefully exhaled blood and guts and assorted limbs lie before him on the floor, the one accounted for eyeball staring up at him reproachfully. Fuck him and fuck the three glasses of whiskey he had before coming here and fuck him, again, because he’s awful and stupid and his ex-wife still looks at him like he might pistol whip her into submission any second._

__Nah, buddy, I don’t need your fucking counseling,he says, wipes a hand over his sweaty face. The sun seems to come barreling right towards him as he finally stands up straight again. _Have fun with your own goddamn bat-handling. S’cuse me.___

__Amanda doesn’t call after him and he doesn’t turn around to see if she’s looking after him._ _

___Is he drunk, he hears Gary ask.__ _

__The lead in his sports bag pulls him down even further into the ground as he leaves the courts. His calves don’t burn at all._ _

__

__\--_ _

__“Oho dear, you kill for fucking fun!”_ _

__“Like two peas in a pot, eh, sugartits?”_ _

__The clerk, who nervously glanced towards the panic button under his desk at Michael’s comment, begins to snicker lowly at the unmistakable traces of Canadian worming themselves into Trevor’s speech. Trevor makes to bite the air right in front of the kids face, like a goddamn dog. The snickering stops._ _

__“Aw damn Mike, you got some change?”_ _

__“Yeah, wait a ‘sec.” He can’t feel his fingers rooting through the pockets of his bermudas, which makes locating coins by touch significantly harder than anticipated. When he finally grabs them, he miscalculates the force it takes to lift them, and they clatter all over the floor, rolling under shelves and jumping over cracks in the tiles. Damn. He stares after them._ _

__The clerk, pimply and with the softest fucking hair, jesus, slowly edgedsout from behind the counter. “Look, I’ll get that. Just take the damn vodka and go, please.”_ _

__“Don’t mind if I do,” Trevor trills out, voice going stupidly high on the don’t and the do, lilting down in between. He should find that grating but doesn’t, right now. God, that weed Trevor brought is so much better than whatever the fuck Barry had pushed him. Figured Trevor knows his drugs._ _

__He doesn’t really know how they get from the gas station to the back booth of a bar, except that it involves Trevor’s hand first grabbing him by the biceps, then sliding down to his lower back. That’s how Michael held Amanda when she was pregnant, how he handled any woman he’d ever pulled out of a strip club and into his car._ _

__God, he’s disgusting._ _

__Trevor is eyeing the darts machine. Michael is just trying to keep his eyes from making the lights of the neon beer ad and the flickering lamps from blending together into mush. The music is mellow, the hollow echo of string guitars and a ghostly voice ringing tinny from the speakers in the rafters. The place doesn’t quite fit into Los Santos and it doesn’t quite fit into Sandy Shores, it’s liquor selection and décor and patronage forming an equally bizarre couple as he and Trevor do. It’s located somewhere on the outskirts of town, too, a rest stop bar and casino with nothing to hide, sat somewhere between the chairs, fading into the passage of time._ _

__“How about it, Mike, you up for a round?” Trevor shouts across the main area of the bar. Michael can‘t clearly hear his tone of voice over the bustle and hustle of the place, but his brain fills in the gaps alright. Up and down, up and down, always performing, always grating. It rips through the weed haze settled over his brain, gets his synapses firing again. For a second, he feels he’s back in North Yankton again, can feel the cold biting at his toes even inside the bar. He slams back the rest of his whiskey, slams the glass down on the table harder than intended and pushes himself off the bar stool harder than intended. He rolls his shoulders and cracks his knuckles, winks at the lady behind the counter. He walks back to Trevor with a spring in his step he can’t tell where it came from. It’s not quite the kick of cocaine, but it’s enough to spur him into action – this exhilarating closeness of standing next to T, being with someone who’s seen his literal and figurative guts glistening sickly in dim motel lighting. He looks at his old friend; rolls his shoulder; blinks twice, looks left. Recognition alights Trevor’s eyes. It’s on._ _

__

__\--_ _

___“Aw man, I lost a-gain,”_ Trevor chirps, goes to throw more money into the pot and bangs his knee against a table leg. The truckers laugh, fat-bellied, wet-throated croaks. They build a circle around the two of them, like vultures circling carrion – like two low-life muggers in an alleyway waiting for their next dumb victim. Their shadows dome over them, loom, threaten – he lets the whiskey loosen his tongue, feels it fall back and almost choke him when he laughs. “Slow down there, big guy, maybe you should let me take over, huh,” he giggles, and yeah, maybe this whole thing worked better when he was young and looked like a fucking god. But this is their oldest con, and they know it well (for a second he lets himself feel the sorrow; that this shtick never got to grow up with them, never got to evolve, show its true potential). T is sprawled back in the booth. He’s acting, but he’s less theatrical than he was only hours ago, than he always is. He knows this one, too. Following the familiar steps seems to have knocked something loose that has bit itself into its brain sometime when they were young and stupid – even before Michael met Amanda, maybe, though it’s all too steeped in alcohol and drugs and visions of grandeur to remember. He looks up at Michael, light in his eyes and his voice as he says “yeah, yeah, yeah Mikey.” Trevor looking up at him like that makes him feel big, broad, bold. Brazen. He makes the first shot count, one-fifty, three bull’s eyes. He can hear Trevor’s voice in his head, still more show than smarts, huh. The next round, it’s a full 180 points. Finishing the game is easy as breathing – he’d always been a good shot, after all. The trucker’s laughter goes quieter and quieter. The music and the frenzy of moving people doesn’t stop, but the laughter dies._ _

__“Fuckin’ A,” Michael shouts, pumps the air with his fist before raking in his winnings. Before he can really register it, one of the truck drivers’ got T by the collar, mashing his fleshy knuckles into the brittle, scabby skin stretched over Trevor’s nose. He can hear the phantom sound of it throb in his ear in time with the bass shaking under his feet. The hammer of his pistol fills the silence before the drop. The splatter of blood and brain matter is satisfyingly real in the sudden quiet._ _

__

__\--_ _

__“Now ain’t this a fun fucking time all around, Mikey?”_ _

__Trevor’s voice is loud even over the howling of the motors and the sirens and the wind, all beating past them at breakneck speed. His old friend sits up on the shotgun door, one hand clinging to the exposed windshield of the cabrio, the other rooting around the footwell for another clip. “Will you get your ass inside already before you get your ugly face slashed off by a graze?” The stupid bastard just laughs, convulsing lungs, somersaulting voice and all. High and crazy and uncontrolled, like the frantic, adrenalin-fueled haze towards the end of a match that makes your bones jittery and your feet so fast you fall more than run. Behind him, the sun sets over the Vinewood Hills. Orange and pink and blue. Very picturesque, very Vinewood. Very them, too, the sun giving one last burst of color before tapping out. He closes his eyes for only a second, committing the scene to memory. It’d make a damn fine movie poster. Then, he rips up the handbreak, turning the car 180 and barreling forwards again. He hears the click of the gun and a second later, he is crashing them through the righteous fire of a newly-exploded cop car engine, Trevor whooping and hollering all the while. Maybe he joins in, maybe not. Only their little bubble of the world can tell._ _

__The freeway opens up before them. He drives them into oncoming traffic, then up a grassy hillside, one side of the car losing touch with the ground, then the other, rough and tumble up into the mountainside until he knows the car’s suspension is fucked to hell. He taskes his foot off the gas and lets them slowly roll towards the swell, where it looks like the ground just drops off, suddenly stops existing._ _

__It doesn’t, nothing ever does. Behind the swell is another stretch of highway, and a small shoulder. Over the highway and down lies the sea. And past that, nothingness._ _

__Trevor jumps off his precarious seat on the windowsill before they’ve gotten anywhere near standstill. He tumbles, rolls his ankle, pushes up off his hands again and just screams, that stupid fucking wild animal scream he always does when he doesn’t know how to contain himself. Michael laughs, then kills the engine._ _

__“Tell me you didn’t miss this, Mike!” Trevor’s still yelling, still jumping around like a madman with his feet in the burning pit._ _

__“Calm down, you lunatic,” Michael says, a grin still tugging at the corner of his mouth. He rounds the hood of the stolen sports car and sits down on it, feet crossed over each other. He fumbles around in the pockets of his cargo shorts some, but he manages to find a cigarette. The smoke billows out of his mouth towards the horizon, clouding the blue of the ocean. Trevor is still breathing hard, but has stopped pacing at least. Michael snorts. “Jesus shit, I invite you out for beer and it ends in a car chase. Fucking typical.”_ _

__“That’s ‘cause I’m fucking fun, Mikey-boy, sugartits,” Trevor sing-songs, coming up beside him now. He puts one of his filthy shoes on the hood of the car, then hoists the rest of his body after, onto the roof of it. Michael is too content in the moment to ask him what in hell he thinks he’s doing. But then Trevor’s hand lands heavy on his shoulder, and yanks. In a second, Michael whips around, grips Trevor by the wrist, glares up at him. The sun is sinking behind his head. He can’t make out his face, but he can see the stupid grin anyway. He glars harder. “What the fuck man!”_ _

__“C’mon, get up here, old man,” Trevor says, and pulls Michael’s arm towards himself, Michael with it. He debates whether he should dig his heels in, whether that would satisfy his outrage, but when he concentrates, he notices that any traces of anger have dissipated already. So he follows Trevor._ _

__They sit on the roof of the car, the metal hot under their asses, the sun beating down on their backs. “Remember how we used to do this?” Trevor asks, voice still dipping and rising, but lilting now, too, a rasp clinging to the edges. Slow and sticky, tongue lazily forming words._ _

__“Yeah I do.” Sunsets in North Yankton were never like this, though, hadn’t looked like the sky was swallowing itself whole, turning itself inside out._ _

__They just sit like that, for some time, until the sun has all but melted into the sea. Distantly, Michael knows they should get rid of the car already, that stopping to watch the sunset is a stupid fucking idea when you’re still wanted by the cops. They haven’t heard sirens in a good hour, though. They are pretty far in the hills. He feels too good to care._ _

__“So I heard loverboy’s on the market again, huh,” Trevor says and the moment is gone. Michael just sits there, open mouthed, for a few seconds, then slaps a hand down on the roof, runs the other through his hair. “Have you been watching my fucking house again, you giant fucking creep, you –“_ _

__“Relax, relax. Frankie told me,” Trevor says, forcing the rubber of his boot against the glass of the windshield, up and down with a squeaking sound. “Although I gotta say, you don’t tell your goddamned best man you’re getting divorced? That’s low, bro.”_ _

__Michael sighs, long and suffering. Then, he sits up straight: “Wait a minute, I told Frank ‘Mand and I were breaking up, I never said nothing about a -“_ _

__“Saw the papers on your kitchen isle.”_ _

__“Oh you fucking fuck –“ He thinks about the broken glass on the tiles, the spilled wine and lies, all of his secrets splattered all over that kitchen, and he feels his head get cloudy. He puts one foot flat on the roof for leverage, puts his hand on Trevor’s shoulder, and shoves. Trevor yelps, arms comically flapping around in the air, and then he’s crashing down. The dull thud of it isn’t near satisfying enough, so he throws his half-burned cigarette right after him. Trevor yelps again, voice high, somewhere between annoying snot-nosed five year old and new-born puppy, forcing a laugh out of Michael._ _

__“Oh you find that fucking funny, huh, bodily harming your best friend, your best man, the only one in the goddamn world – “_ _

__“Shut up already, you loser.” Michael hops down on the other side of the car. He tries for grace but nearly rolls his ankle when he does. Trevor wheezes on the other side of the car. He goes round to see Trevor, lying sprawled out on his back, propped up on his elbows. He is wearing those god-awful neon shorts, and they ride up high on his thigh, too high for fucking comfort. Michael makes sure to step on his hand when he steps out his cigarette, making the other let out a short shout and roll over, finally not pointing his disgusting dick at Michael anymore._ _

__“Aw c’mon Mikey don’t be like that. You can talk to little ol’ Trevor!” Michael stares at his best friend (the only one in the goddamn world to ever give a shit about you, his brain helpfully fills in Trevor’s cut-off sentence from earlier), rolled up on the grass in pain, but grinning up at him with exhilarated joy, uninhibited, untamed. Right then, there’s no contempt in it, no thinly veiled disgust, disappointment, anger. Michael sighs deep from within, chest heaving, then drops down on the ground next to Trevor._ _

__They’re silent for a while. Michael really wishes they thought to steal some liquor from the bar they ditched. “Yeah. Yeah, we’re getting a divorce.”  
Trevor laughs, the sound tumbling down the cliffside in front of them. “So you finally realized that your marriage is a sham and your entire relationship was based on lies and drugs and financial dependency?” He can’t do anything but look at Trevor strangely, for a couple seconds. “Damn, you sound like my fucking shrink, may he rest in peace.”_ _

__“You don’t get to wish that to someone you blew up with a goddamn RPG, car and all. That’s just poor taste.”_ _

__“I’m not taking lessons in decency from you of all people.”_ _

__They sun is all but gone now but the grass under them and the car engine to their side are still warm. The air hangs heavy over their heads, all the unspoken words between them coagulating. He pictures them in a wide shot, camera off to their side, their silhouettes black against the sports car and before them the abyss, the ocean. Another great movie poster._ _

__“Y’think you’ll ever be done with all the lying?” Trevor says, continues before Michael can get a word in. “I mean, everything’s already gone to shit and there’s no one really left to tell ‘em to. Me an Franklin and Lester, we know not to trust a damn thing coming out of your mouth and I’m sure Amanda and the kids caught on a loooong time ago. Maybe it’s time to give it up, huh?”_ _

__Michael lets the silence swallow up all his doubts before he answers, “yeah, maybe you’re right”, forcing the words out like nails through cranial bone (grating, catching, wrong)._ _

__Trevor does a truthfully comical double-take at his side. Michael can’t hold back his snort. “Ok ok, let me explain.” Trevor motions for him to go again, mock-expectant. “Ok, so I know I’ve been a liar and a cheat and there’s no turning back time. But, y’know’ you’re right. It’s all over anyway. Maybe if I hadn’t lied so much, it would’ve been over some time ago already. So I was thinking – yeah, don’t think this was your idea – I was thinking I’m gonna give it a shot.”_ _

__Michael expects an irritating slow clap, maybe, some mocking argument, maybe even a fist to the head. He surely deserves it. What he gets instead is chirping cicadas and crashing waves. Only what feels like hours later, motion zaps through Trevor like lightning. He flings his legs to the side and under himself, sitting up as if for for prayer. He waves his hands at Michael urgently and it takes him a second to realize he wants him to sit up on his knees as well. “We look like two little girls ready to make daisy chains”, Michael grumbles, but complies. It’s all too similar to a scene way back in the snow, the two of them kneeling over a small fire, Trevor insisting that your masculinity is so fragile, Mikey, what’s a little hand-holding between too men trying not to die from frostbite. So when Trevor holds out his pinky, he only rolls his eyes because that’s what he’s expected to do – that’s how they work._ _

__Trevor’s face is stern and serious, less crazed than Michael last knew him, before dying. He wonders, not for the first time, how many years it took T to fully develop that slightly off-kilter look he’d always had into that special brand of mania of today. Right now, he just looks like T. “Right, so swear on it.”_ _

__“Only if you – “_ _

__“Yeah, yeah, me too, calm down, princess.” Neither of them says what Trevor is even swearing on, but it doesn’t really matter. Honesty, loyalty, real, fucking effort to get better – What does it even matter._ _

__Michael grins and entwines their fingers. It’s just like that scene around the fire – let’s swear on it. Let’s always be like this._ _

__“Yeah, I’ll swear on it.”_ _

__The clouds hang low and purple over the stars, scraping the hills behind them. Somewhere in the distance, a siren goes off. He guesses the cops found a new target. He guesses they’re free now._ _

__He lights another cigarette and doesn’t even mind when Trevor shoves at him to sit normally again, throws a foot over Michael’s ankle._ _

__Fucking free._ _

**Author's Note:**

> ...hello, GTA fandom...? I'm so late to this party...
> 
> This has been sitting in my files for ages and I felt like I needed to get it out there because I wasn't getting anywhere new with it. So be warned, I only have a tiny bit more of this written out at this time. Updates will be slow. 
> 
> I have a general plot for this in mind but it will get a lot more episodic from now on. I want to either flash back to North Yankton or describe the slow and arduous legal process of getting divorced in the next chapter. Haven't decided yet. We'll see. 
> 
> I'm always happy to hear your thought! Either on here or on tumblr @smalltowndream <3


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